THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGUST, 153 



butterflies were always several miles from water. When I went out I 

 thought I should find a good many insects at the watering places, water 

 being so scarce there, but on the contrary, I found few or none there. 

 The springs or wells are 15 to 25 miles apart, and the intervening desert 

 is absolutely dry and parched, yet in good part is covered with bushes of 

 several kinds, cactus, etc., and also sometimes with a monstrous tree, the 

 " Joshua," Yucca breinfolia, which looks as if it belonged to another 

 world. No gnats, no mosquitoes, but few birds, no squirrels, very few 

 snakes and those all rattlers, but plenty of sand and so hot ! The sun 

 beats down with vertical rays and the air is like that from a furnace. I 

 saw no other butterfly at the river than I have mentioned, except one 

 Danais, small, pale-colored, and it seemed to me diff"erently marked from 

 any I have seen at San Bernardino." 



NOTES ON THE LARVA OF BUCCULATRIX 

 AMBROSI^FOLIELLA. 



BY v. T. CHAMBERS, COVINGTON, KY.' 



This species was described by me in the Cincinnati Quarterly Journal 

 of Science, v. 2, p. 119, and it was said to feed upon the leaves of 

 Ambrosia trifida, in the larval stage. Afterwards, in a note in the Ameri- 

 can Entomologist, I suggested that as it had only been bred from a 

 collection of leaves of that plant, and had not actually been seen feeding, 

 and as some species of Bucculatrix sometimes crawl away from their food 

 plants to pupate, it was possible that it might turn out that this larva did 

 not feed upon Ambrosia. This summer, however, I have been fortunate 

 enough to find the larva mining the leaves of A. trifida, and also of 

 several varieties of Heltanthns ; indeed it is much more numerous on 

 Helianthus than on Ambrosia. Lithocolletis afubrosiceella and L. helianthi- 

 vorella feeding on the same plants, many would consider only varieties of 

 one species ; as also many would consider Tischeria ambrosiceel/a and T. 

 heliopsiseiia, which feed on the same plants, and on Heliopsis, varieties of 

 one species. It is a little singular that so many of these minute leaf- 

 mining species should feed on so many varieties. and species oi Helianthus 

 and Heliopsis, and all on the single species of A?nbrosia, and on no other 



